nette’s weblog

Well, since TV Guide is reporting it, I’m assuming that it’s accurate: Angel is FINALLY officially renewed for season 5, and James Marsters (Spike) will be on the show full-time. Yay! Of course, in the Buffyverse people are brought back to life all the time, so it’s still possible that he’s going to be killed off in the final Buffy… Also, Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia) is apparently NOT going to be a full-timer, which is too bad, because I like Cordy and really wanted her to hook up with Angel. But overall it’s good news.

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Well, Minnesota has done it. They’ve come back from down 3-1 to win 4-3 twice in one playoff year, a first in NHL history. I guess now I have to root for Minnesota to win the cup, because they’re the only team left that I kind of like. I think it would be really funny if they could come back from down 3-1 twice more. Doesn’t seem very likely. Now we get to watch the Wild-Ducks series… he he. (Well, I think it’s funny.)

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So I’m a member of this online forum for Moore Action Collectibles, the company that makes the Buffy action figures. Basically, it’s a place to read discussions about the Buffy/Angel figures as well as about general Buffy/Angel stuff, so I can always get the latest news and updates and things like that without googling for everything separately. One of the big categories of discussions is custom action figures. People make their own Buffy figures (usually using normal Buffy parts) and then they post picutures of them to get feedback. They also discuss tips and techniques for doing this to your own figures. A number of years ago, me and Matthew did this kind of thing to our GI Joes. We dismantled a lot of them and put the pieces back together in different combinations in order to make more interesting guys. We also did a little bit of repainting of a couple of the figures. Diana already customized one Buffy figure for me. She cut the cloth outer clothes off of a “Slave Cordelia” and repainted her to make a better outfit. I think she looks much better now, and Diana had a lot of fun painting her. I want to do a repaint of a Buffy figure myself, now. I’m going to make a Buffy into a Buffybot, but I’m going to have Diana do most of the work for that because I really want her to turn out well. I don’t want to repaint any of the other figures that I have now, either, except maybe Spike, but I would probably have Diana do that too. I think for one to do on my own (at least until I’ve tried it once to see if I’m any good) I’ll just have to find a cheap figure on ebay or something.

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Okay, you know how sometimes you find pennies or something in the drier because they were left in the pocket of our pants? Well, just now I found a computer chip in the drier. It must have come off of the dead piece of RAM that Dan has on his keychain, and I guess I missed it when I checked the pockets. (I always check the pockets because it makes a real mess when someone leaves paper in their pockets.) Anyway, I was pulling the clothes out of the drier, and I noticed this little black plastic thing, and I picked it up, and was highly amused when I saw what it was. I don’t think many people in the world have ever found a computer chip in their drier before. Only in my house…

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Well, we have now had our couch for a whole day, and I am very pleased with it. It’s so much better than the old one. It’s nice and comfortable and isn’t falling apart, and doesn’t have a really annoying slip-cover on it. The little fold-down table in the middle is very useful because it has cup holders, and makes a good spot to put my glass of water. Over the course of the day I have had a chance to work sitting on the couch and watch hockey (still in progress) sitting on the couch, and it seems to work well for both. The only problem is that I haven’t quite gotten the hang of making it recline and un-recline smoothly. I think I’ll improve with practice, though.

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Leo Laporte (of The Screen Savers) loves to hack his Tivo. They’ve done a number of bits on the show about this, showing you how to do things with your Tivo. There’s a problem, though. Leo has a Series 1 Tivo. We have a Series 2 Tivo. So we never get to learn how to hack our Tivo. This same problem apparently carries over to the internet, too, because there are lots of hacks for the Series 1 Tivo, but basically nothing for the Series 2 Tivo. It’s really annoying. We would really like to be able to 1) use the internet to download the program information instead of the phoneline and 2) backup the shows we record to the computer. Since there’s no hacks, we can’t do it. And we’re certainly not going to try and do the hacking ourselves because we’d probably just break the Tivo, and that would be bad.

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Okay, not really. But we did have some interesting weather this evening. (I know, I know, most people reading this live around here…) There was this big thunderstorm somewhere, and I guess it had a tornado in it somewhere, because the tornado warning came on the TV. The storm barely hit Ann Arbor, though. It only rained for a little while. During that little while, though, we got hail. It’s always kind of cool when we get hail, because it doesn’t happen very often. It wasn’t as cool as the one time we were on vacation when there was so much hail that it looked like snow. I think that was someplace in the desert, too. Maybe that was on the trip where we ended the 4-year drought in Arizona by making it rain the whole vacation.

On a kind of related note (well, related to the title, anyway), I got this book the other day called “Snoopy’s guide to the writer’s life”. It’s full of the Snoopy the “Literary Ace” comics and then has little things from famous writers commenting on their favorite ones and giving writing advice. It’s very cool. The Snoopy writing comics are some of my all-time favorites. I have one as my background picture on my laptop. I’ll leave you with this comic:

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Finally! We actually bought a couch instead of just talking/thinking about it. Partly this is because we’re getting a bunch of money back from taxes, so we have plenty of money to buy it with. We’re getting a La-z-boy reclining couch that has this little built in table in the middle that folds down. We didn’t absolutely need the little foldy table, but the couch we liked best comes with it, so it’s just like a bonus. We had been to the La-z-boy store a few times, but they only had that couch in this really ugly brown color, and to order it in a nicer color would have been several hundred dollars more expensive, not to mention having to wait a long time to get it. We went there yesterday hoping that their “36 hour” sale would include discounts on ordering. But, of course, it didn’t. So, we decided to stop by ArtVan, just to see what they had in the way of reclining couches. As it turned out, they had the exact same La-z-boy couch, but it was in a much, much better color. So we decided to get it. We call it red, but really it’s this kind of dark burgandy color. Ideally, we had wanted blue, but if you look around our apartment, the main theme in other rooms seems to be that same kind of red and black. So it will fit with the rest of the house. Also, the fabric has little flecks of blue in it, so our blue curtains will still match. Not that anything in our living room really matches. We have such as bizarre mix of stuff. They would hate us on Trading Spaces. Actually, they would probably like us because we wouldn’t be afraid to say what we liked and what we hated, but they would hate our stuff and not put any of it back into the room when it was finished. Anyway, we have a couch — or will when it arrives on Wednesday. People will be welcome to to drop by to see it (or sit on it to watch hockey) if they’d like.

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Okay, on a fairly regular basis I have dreams where I am back in school (usually high school) and for whatever reason (usually not my fault) I don’t know any of the material that I need to know for the test. It happened again last night. This time it was an English class (actually, it’s usually an English class… hmmm) and we had to take this exam that started with a bunch of vocabulary words that we had to define, and then had an essay part based on reading excerpts from the book. I arrived at the classroom (on Monday, it was supposed to be) to find that I had not only forgotten to study the vocab, but I hadn’t even read the book. I didn’t even know what it was about. Since the only word that I even recognized from the vocab was “mausoleum”, I skipped that part and went to the essay section. But since I hadn’t read the book, I had to read all the excerpts in order to do the essays, with the result that I was completely running out of time to do anything. So most of the dream was actually taken up by reading parts of whatever book it was supposed to be. (And people say you can’t read in dreams!) Anyway, the real reason that I bothered to relate this rather uninteresting dream is because this type of dream happens to me all the time. It has to mean something. Am I afraid of not knowing anything and looking like an idiot or something? The thing is, these dreams are usually not upsetting. I never start to cry or anything, and I never actually care that I don’t know the material, because it’s always something pointless. Occasionally I get angry because the teacher will get annoyed with me for not knowing something that I have no possible way of knowing. But that’s really about it. So, I don’t really understand why I’m always having these kinds of dreams and what it says about me. I’m sure a shrink would have lots of fun analyzing it, though.

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Magical powers are something that I think about a lot. Since I read and write fantasy novels and watch Buffy, Angel, and Charmed on TV I tend to get magic on the brain relatively often. If I could only choose one magical power, I think it would have to be teleportation. Can you imagine how much time it would save if you didn’t have to walk/drive/fly places? I would love to be able to get anywhere instantaneously. Some people would pick flying over teleportation. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think flying would be really, really cool and a lot of fun. But it just wouldn’t be as useful as teleportation. I wouldn’t want to have to fly across the country to go on vacation when I could just suddenly appear at my destination instead. Plus, the luggage could get really heavy if you had to carry it while flying. To be honest, flying wouldn’t even be my second choice. The other power I would most want is the ability to clean myself with magic. It would be so nice to never have to brush my teeth or take a shower ever again. It would save so much time. And maybe as a related power I’d be able to clean my clothes with magic — and my house. No laundry and no cleaning! Wouldn’t that be great? Other powers that would be cool but aren’t quite as desirable include throwing fireballs, turning invisible, telekinesis, and changing appearance at will. So, those are my favorite magical powers. Feel free to comment with your own favorite powers.

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